The best scenes in this episode, though, are the ones with John as an adult. The Marine sniper mission — which has John parachuting into the wilderness to take out an elusive terrorist money launderer code-named Gray Wolf — is a darkly hilarious shaggy dog story, with a potent punchline. John stays put in the woods for nine months, dressing his own wounds and surviving on bugs and berries. Then, before John can get his shot off, Hal Jordan flies in and captures the Gray Wolf, as a favor to some Department of Defense bureaucrat he met in a strip club.
In a sublime bit of irony, John ends up being dishonorably discharged because of Hal’s bungling. The good news is, Bernadette finally relents and lets her son stop working so hard toward becoming the next Green Lantern, instead encouraging him to follow his clear passion for drawing and design. Funny enough, this is what ends up winning over the Guardians, who are impressed with John’s ability to draft elaborately detailed buildings and objects from memory.
The loop on this episode closes when a Guardians recruiter visits John’s college and tells him to jump into a void through a hole in the floor — which he does without hesitation because he knows better than to show any fear. That hole drops him into the mall where we found him at the start.
This episode’s fragmented narrative structure is clever, but this isn’t just a case of TV writers showing off. (Not that there would be anything wrong with razzle-dazzle for razzle-dazzle’s sake. Television is supposed to be entertaining, after all.) The point is to illustrate all that John carries with him, why he is unlike other humans and why those qualities might appeal to the Guardians after decades of dealing with Hal.
The Guardians clearly find humanity confusing. The one we meet knows enough to present herself as someone who looks like Laura Linney, rather than in her (or his?) natural blue-skinned, spindly form. But nothing John tells her about his parents — and about why he loves them despite their grueling Green Lantern obsession — makes sense to her. When John tries to explain that humans are raised, not programmed, the Guardian does not see a distinction.
Yet in John’s own human interactions, he too seems like an alien. He is stiffly formal in conversation, often coming across as disengaged. John is assertive. (His mother made sure of that, reminding him, “Sometimes a Black man has to raise his own hand.”) But he is a loner by nature — or perhaps nurture. In that way, he may be more like Hal than the Guardians realize.
